The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  Thursday 11th, Bell Inn, Aston Clinton Missed yesterday. I suppose when you reach an oasis you don't write.

  The children arrived in a heap and a tumble and we had a faintly hysterical lunch where everybody wanted to eat everybody's food except their own. Plates were exchanged, forksful of ‘try this bit’ were handed around and we generally left the bemused waiters cross-eyed. [...]

  I read most of the day and half the night (4.30 am) a book by Carlos Baker about Ernest Hemingway.239 I have always loathed E.H.’s writing ever since I was a boy of about 14 I suppose and read For Whom the Bell Tolls.240 The gross sentimentality of the man offended me, and still does. I cannot understand why ‘critics’ describe his ‘harsh realism etc.’. It seems to me he was a romantic shit. But this book, though too lyrical at times to be considered a work of scholarship, shows the man was the work. He himself was a shit of the first order and an Oscar winning sentimentalist. And yet everybody I know who knew him adored him – even the mystic Archie MacLeish. I feel alternately sorry for him and contemptuous as I read this book and still, as they quote extracts from his writings as I go through the book feel slightly nauseated. I'll finish it today. One day, perhaps soon, I'll get all his works in paperback (he doesn't deserve hard-covers) and plough through him again. I'll choose a time when I'm constipated.

  My shakes have practically gone! Ah what discipline! What Discipline? You may well ask. Well now, instead of 11/2 bottles of vodka a day, it is now cut down to 1/2 a bottle. What's the next move? A descent and return to beer I think. Especially as I've lost my taste for it. I wonder if I can find barrelled beer in Suisse to keep in the house. I will ask the lady called ‘Hedy’ in Olden auberge in Gstaad if this is possible. I shall become fat but jolly and not frighten children no more. Any more. No more.

  Friday 12th We leave today for London and on Monday for Paris and on Wednesday for Gstaad. What we do after that it is undecided but deliciously so. If the Med is nice and enjoying an Indian summer we will drive down in slow stages to the yacht at Cannes and cruise around for a bit. We may go to the party for ‘Scorpions’ given by the Rainiers at Monaco and live on the yacht and go by mini-moke to La Ferme, or La Réserve, or you name it. St Trop should be quiet at this time of year.241 Corsica maybe? Calvi, Bonifacio, Costa Smeralda, Cappo Caccia? Potofino, Ischia, Porto Santo Stephano, Positano, Portofino?242 Or other places we haven't discovered yet. All fair-weather or perhaps even to Mexico and the old regime. And in the new year, who knows?

  Ivor came to have dinner and we ate in Michael Harris’ mother's cottage (Harris is the owner of the Bell) and watched a ghastly but very enjoyable English film with Peggy Mount and David Kossoff etc. about cockneys taking over a country pub.243 We had things called Bell Inn Smokies which are pieces of smoked haddock in a sauce with cheese on top in tiny individual casseroles. Mouth-watering. We must come back, if only for those.

  Ivor will be coming over to Gstaad around about November with Robbie and the other girl. I must see Rossier in Geneva about getting all the equipment we can find to make life easier for everybody all round.244 Electrical beds, pulleys and grips and any gadgets which will make everyone happier. If only we can get the strength back into Ivor's arms. He can move them now to a limited extent, which is a miracle in itself. We shall see what the year will bring. [...]

  Sunday 28th, Gstaad We have been here for about two weeks – I will look up the exact date later – and already it has done me a world of good. Shortly after we'd arrived Lillabetta and Brook arrived with Maria. And we, i.e. B and I, have played badminton every day in the morning and occasionally in the afternoons. We have taken long fast five-mile walks and for about a week I was so still that I could barely turn over in bed and my hands shook so badly that drinks had to be held up to my lips by E. Now however I am as steady as a rock and [...] I am infinitely more limber than I have been for a long time. I have reduced my boozing to practically zero – by my standards. A vodka martini before lunch, and wine with dinner. And I frequently don't touch the wine. I have taken up the drinking man's diet again about three days ago. [...]

  I have just finished a very readable Life of Mussolini, which depressed me so much that I hurriedly re-read Waugh's Vile Bodies to put me in a good frame of mind for sleep last night.245 Poor man. What he lacked, it would seem when the chips were down, was moral fibre. L.M.F. He was a born coward with a woolly mind, a poseur, and a lousy actor if the many photos of him are to be taken as evidence. I sort of like him though, which one could hardly say of Hitler. It gave me a vindictive satisfaction to see the balloon of his pomposity pricked by the British and Yanks, both of which nations he had contemptuously dismissed in the days of his power before the Second World War as decadent layabouts. Never, I suppose, in the history of warfare has a nation been so derided for its inadequacy and general cowardice. Not only by its enemies, but by its allies.

  Monday 29th [...] I fell off my disciplined waggon last night with a thunderous crash and sat up with Brook until 5.30 in the a.m. drinking in the mean-time a whole bottle of Scotch alone. I am feeling it today but have abandoned the diet and stopped all alcohol. I am topped up with milk and chocolate and two veganins and lots of water and health salts. And I had chips and fried eggs and grilled tomatoes and crunchy bread and butter for lunch and slept for about three hours while E was being massaged. I feel distant and distrait but not too bad, and I don't have the shakes. [...]

  Brook became quite maudlin and lamented the fact that he had grown up in the shadow of his famous father, that it had crippled his spiritual and material life etc. I was fairly curt and told him not to blame his life on others, but to become his own boss. I suggested that he went into the garage business which he owns as a working partner with acting as a hobby. He says he couldn't afford it, but of course he could if he buckled down to it. Lillabetta is, I suspect a very good business manager and could, and does, I believe handle all the business side. Otherwise, even more than I have, he will suddenly find himself middle aged and looking back on a life-time of self-indulgent waste. I think Brook's ambition was and is to be a golf pro. He never keeps off the subject for long. Though he knows, good a golfer as he is, that he is not that good. He is such a marvellous chap and I hate to see his unhappiness. I think he could write too, far better than his boring brother Alan who writes ‘tough’ diluted James Bond novels, with a touch of Ambler and Graham Greene.246 And with no shred of humour. But he cannot bring himself to settle before that awful blank sheet of paper. Anything is better than the indignity of being in effect a sort of super-extra with a few lines here and there as in Eagles and Anne. Even being a major actor like myself finds the profession insulting at times. [...] I am using Maria's room as a study until my room is ready downstairs. The book shelves have been made and in two or three days having shaved and polished the floor I shall start using it. Some years ago I was talking with E in the middle of the night about this and that and she asked me if I had any ambitions, minor, realizable ones. I thought and said that yes I had a small one but it was too late now. What was it she asked? I told her that it had been a childhood ambition to own the entire Everyman's Library. One thousand, numbered, gleaming, uniform books and from the age of about 12 I began to collect them. By the time I was in my twenties I had about 300 or so, and then, to my dismay Dent-Dutton changed the format and they were no longer uniform. Some were tall some were medium and some were the old size. Some, I said, must be in New York [...], some with Ivor in Hampstead, some in II Squire's Mount. Without saying a word to me she wrote to Dent-Dutton and asked if they could find all the books with the first pocket-sized uniformity. It took them a long time but they found them all. She then had them bound in several different colours of calf – red for novels, yellow for biography, green for poetry etc. etc. The whole thing cost her about £2,600. This was done five years ago and the books have been in packing cases ever since, but in two or three days they will be out and home on the shelves. It will be thrilling for me to see them again, especially the
poetry section as it was from Everyman's that I first learned a body of poetry entirely on my own and without benefit of having it rammed down my throat for exams etc. in school. I know which sides of the pages my favourites lie on. It is a fantastic reference library with the index in my head. I shall browse in that place for the rest of my life. They will take up at least one wall of the room, and they should be a splendid sight.

  I told E that while up at Oxford and in the RAF I would, when ever I could, go to London for the weekends and steal books from the giant Foyle's in Charing Cross Road. I told her how I used to do it. During the war, when I did my best stealing, there was an acute shortage of paper and Foyle's couldn't wrap the books up as they do nowadays. I would buy one book and pay for it. The assistant would give a receipt which I would ostentatiously leave hanging out of the pages of the legitimate purchase. Now whether one bought one book or ten you still had only the one slip of paper to show for it. I would then pick up one or two Everyman's, taking a long long time – as much as an hour sometimes before I sauntered quietly out of the shop. I must have stolen scores of Everyman's in this way. One day I was up to my usual tricks in Foyles when an Irish friend of mine called Mannock Quinn was doing likewise in the corner. I had been bold this day and had about five books in addition to the one I'd bought, when Mannock came and stood casually beside me. Out of the corner of his mouth he said softly: ‘Put all the books back, Taffy. Put ‘em all back.’ Very slowly and acting the part of a man who could not make up his mind I, one by one, put them all back. Later on when we were safely away from the shop Mannock told me that he'd seen one of the male assistants go into the little glass walled office that Foyle's used to have then, put on a raincoat and follow me around. I never stole a book again, and indeed, within a year, having almost immediately become a ‘star’, I didn't need to anymore. But the story doesn't end there. After having told E the story of my only thieving she said that the next time we were in London we must go to Foyle's together. I said we would. And we did. Working there temporarily was Sybil's niece Helen Greenford. The shop had become bigger than ever and it was difficult to find her. Word, however had spread through the store like wildfire that we were there and she found us through the good offices of a shop detective. Nobody in our section was buying books anymore – they just stood and stared at us. Eventually when the press became too great and embarrassing I asked the manager if I might take my ‘niece’ around the corner for a cup of coffee for ten minutes. He agreed. People will agree to anything if you're famous enough. Helen left and we went home to the Dorchester. In the car, E opened her bag, and handed me a book. It was an old edition of the Shropshire Lad.247 With all those hundreds of people around, to say nothing of store detectives watching for our safety, all of them staring and oohing and aahing over her beauty, she had stolen a book! I burst into a cold sweat. I could see the headlines. ‘Millionaire Couple Steal Book From Foyle's. "Book not worth more than five bob," says manager.’ Christ. I gave her a terrible and rather pompous row but her delight was not to be crushed. It's the first and last thing she ever stole in her life, except of course husbands! [...]

  OCTOBER

  Wednesday 1st, Gstaad [...] Brook and Mike (on his motor bicycle) and I went down to the village to walk around Cadonau's where I ordered a table-tennis table and all the trimmings, where we bought a dozen books, all paperbacks. [...]

  I did not know quite how significant the phrase ‘blind drunk’ was until a couple of weeks ago. I have played badminton since I was a boy in the secondary school and have no doubt that if I'd wanted to and had the proper coaching I could have become a champion of some minor sort. In fact nobody, except champions, has ever beaten me in thirty years. But the first few days here, playing Brook, I was continually beaten. I could not see the shuttle. Since stopping drinking however I can now see the shuttle right onto the racquet and am beating him more and more confidently every day. This ties in with Esmond Knight's telling me that the doctors had told him that he was losing what little sight he had in his one eye through booze.248 (Teddy lost one eye during the war and the sight of the other was badly affected.) And Teddy has never been a heavy drinker – certainly not in my class. So ‘blind drunk’ means something after all. [...]

  Thursday 2nd [...] I read a book called The Center by the Yankee political columnist Stewart Alsop, but fell asleep over it and slept for a couple of hours.249 I finished the book later that day and learned even more about the mad intangibles of Washington politics. So haphazard is the choice of representatives of the people, not only in the USA, but elsewhere that it seems to me we are very lucky that some maniac hasn't had his finger on the button and sent us all into oblivion a long time ago.

  [...] Today I am driving B and E to Geneva where we will spend the night at the Hotel President. This afternoon we shall visit the Art Gallery where they display some of E's collection and then to the Hospital to see Dr Rossier to arrange when he wants us to officially open the new apparatus which we bought for the Paraplegics ward – it cost us $50,000 I think – and to ask him if he can help us get the proper beds, pulleys etc. for Ivor's room here in Chalet Ariel.250 It will give me a funny feeling going back to that hospital where we spent so many horrified and anxious days. [...]

  Thursday 2nd, President Hotel, Geneva There is no way of knowing how infinitely nostalgic and irrevocable this street is. Jesus, when I remember how often and how long I paced this particular quai waiting and watching for a baby, both of whom are alive and one of whom is dead. And nobody knows the soft touch of a soft skin of a soft mind on a hard hand. An unsympathetic hand. A hand that doesn't understand. Wherever I turn I find that I don't know what exactly I'm doing.

  That was written last night and indicates my temporary insanity. I was in a fearful state and I don't understand quite why. I didn't drink very much and apart from missing the autoroute after Bulle the day – physically at least – went smoothly enough. We arrived about 4.15, booked in at the Hotel which is nicer than I remember and took a cab to the Musee des Beaux Arts to look at E's paintings. Would you believe it but they were not on display but down in the basement. This angered us both, but E more than me. To make matters worse the oils we did see and which were hung were horrible. E's decided to take them out and hang them on the yacht, suitably weather-proofed by Sotheby's. Madame Favez, who showed us around the cellar-basement, was a shrill screaming harridan with a dreadful accent. She sounded like somebody from Tiger Bay.251

  Afterwards we went to the hospital to see Rossier. He was very sweet and showed us the new machine we'd bought him. It really works. I asked him about arranging a bed for Ivor at Gstaad and he will start to work on it shortly. He let slip that the last time he talked to Walsh two weeks ago, they were worried about Ivor's heart.252 He covered it up pretty quickly by saying what a remarkable recovery Ivor had made and how ‘phenomenal’ it was and so on but the knife had already gone deep into my stomach.

  When we came out of the Beaux Arts the cab-driver had vanished, but he returned in a few minutes having very sweetly bought a single rose for Elizabeth. Somewhere between the hospital and dinner brooding set in. Between long silences deadly insults were hurled about. At one point E, knowing I was in a state of nastiness, said to me at the lousy Italian restaurant we went to: Come on Richard, hold my hand. Me: I do not wish to touch your hands. They are large and ugly and red and masculine. Or words to that effect. After that my mind was like a malignant cancer – I was incurable. I either remained stupidly silent or, if I did speak, managed an insult a second. What the hell's the matter with me. I love milady more than my life and I adore Brook. Why do I hurt them so much and spoil the day?

  I am very contrite this morning but one of these days it's going to be too late cock, too late. E has just said that I really must get her the 69 carat ring to make her ugly big hands look smaller and less ugly! Nobody turns insults to her advantage more swiftly or more cleverly than Lady Elizabeth. That insult last night is going to cost me. Betcha! [...]
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br />   Friday 3rd, Gstaad [...] E says that last night in my sleep I was winding-up and pitching baseball, going through all the motions, spit-balls, change-ups, curves. All done in deadly seriousness, while fast asleep and lying on my back! It must have been occasioned by my explaining to Brook a couple of days ago some of the subtleties of baseball and pitching. In particular the latter. Thank God I wasn't playing rugby in my sleep or E might have been crash-tackled a few times.

  Winter is definitely coming in with a decided nip in the air. It's early in the morning, not a cloud in the sky and the sun is just tipping the peaks, notably the snow capped Diableret, with blue-gold.253 The table-tennis has arrived and we shall erect it to-day. The floor and bookcases are ready in ‘Richard's Room’ and the long hidden books will start to breathe again. I can't wait to see their serried ranks. (From the french verb ‘serrer'; to squeeze or press. ‘Serrez à droite.’)